The Raven Girls
by Roxa.Halt
Summary: A host of co-dependent teens comb rural Virginia for a dead Welsh Queen with dubious magical powers. Trees talk; hitmen put down roots; dead people live; living people die. Cars are described in loving detail. Fuckweasel. Nobody kisses anybody, which is weird because everybody loves everybody. There's rich girls! Poor girls! Sad girls! Angry girls! Raven girls! Collect them all!
1. Prologue

**Hi! :) This is basically just The Raven Boys but gender swapped ( I might do the other books if anyone is interested ). I don't think a lot of people will read this, but I wanted to do this, so here it is! ( BTW this is my first Fanfiction, also has anyone seen Azeher's (She's an artist on Deviantart) gender swapped fanart of Gansey, Ronan, Noah, Adam, and Blue. It's amazing!) Anyways, Enjoy! :) **

Blue Sargent had forgotten how many times he'd been told that he would kill his true love. His family traded in predictions. These predictions tended, however, to run toward the unspecific. Things like: _Something terrible will happen to you today. It might involve the number six. _Or: _Money is coming. Open your hand for it. _Or: _You have a big decision and it will not make itself. _

The people who came to the little, bright blue house at 300 Fox Way didn't mind the imprecise nature of their fortunes. It became a game, a challenge, to realize the exact moment that the predictions came true. When a van carrying six people wheeled into a client's car two hours after her psychic reading, she could nod with a sense of accomplishment and release. When a neighbor offered to buy another client's old lawn mower if he was looking for a bit of extra cash, he could recall the promise of money coming and sell it with the sense that the transaction had been foretold. Or when a third client heard her husband say, _This is a decision that has to be made, _she could remember the same words being said by Maurice Sargent over a spread of tarot cards and then leap decisively to action. But the imprecise nature of the fortunes stole some of their power.

The predictions could be dismissed as coincidences, hunches. They were a chuckle in the Walmart parking lot when you ran into an old friend as promised. A shiver when the number seventeen appeared on an electric bill. A realization that even if you had discovered the future, it really didn't change how you lived in the present. They were truth, but they weren't all of the truth.

"I should tell you" Maurice always advised his new clients, "that this reading will be accurate, but not specific."

It was easier that way.

But this was not what Blue was told. Again and again, he had his fingers spread wide, his palm examined, his cards plucked from velvet-edged decks and spread across the fuzz of a family friend's living room carpet. Thumbs were pressed to the mystical, invisible third eye that was said to lie between everyone's eyebrows. Runes were cast and dreams interpreted, tea leaves scrutinized and seances conducted.

All the men came to the same conclusion, blunt and inexplicably specific. What they all agreed on, in many different clairvoyant languages, was this:

If Blue were to kiss his true love, she would die.

For a long time, this bothered Blue. The warning was specific, certainly, but in the way of a fairy tale. It didn't say how his true love would die. I didn't say how long after the kiss she would survive. Did it have to be a kiss on the lips? Would a chaste peck on the back of her palm prove as deadly?

Until he was eleven, Blue was convinced that he would silently contract an infectious disease. One press of his lips to his hypothetical soulmate and she, too, would die in a consumptive battle untreatable by modern medicine. When he was thirteen, Blue decided that jealousy would kill her instead - an old girlfriend emerging at the moment of that first kiss, bearing a handgun and a heart full of hurt. When he turned fifteen, Blue concluded that his father's tarot cards were just a pack of playing cards and that the dreams of his father and the other clairvoyant men were fueled by mixed drinks rather than otherworldly insight, and so the prediction didn't matter.

He knew better, though. The predictions that came out of 300 Fox Way were unspecific, but undeniably true. His father had dreamt Blue's broken wrist on the first day of school. His uncle Jim predicted Maurice's tax return to within ten dollars. His older cousin Orion always began to hum his favorite song a few minutes before it came on the radio.

No one in the house ever really doubted that Blue was destined to kill his true love with a kiss. It was a threat, however, that had been around for so long that it had lost its force. Picturing six-year-old Blue in love was such a far-off thing as to be imaginary.

And by sixteen, Blue had decided he would never fall in love, so it didn't matter.

But that belief changed when his father's half brother Neeve came to their little town of Henrietta. Neeve had gotten famous for doing loudly what Blue's father did quietly. Maurice's readings were done in his front room, mostly for residents of Henrietta and the valley around it. Neeve, on the other hand, did his readings on television at five o'clock in the morning. He had a website featuring old soft-focus photographs of him staring unerringly at the viewer. Four books on the supernatural bore his name on the cover.

Blue had never met Neeve, so he knew more about his half uncle from a cursory web search than from personal experience. Blue wasn't sure why Neeve was coming to visit, but he knew his imminent arrival spurred a legion of whispered conversations between Maurice and his two best friends, Poseidon and Caleb - the sort of conversations that trailed off into sipping coffee and tapping pens on the table when Blue entered the room. But Blue wasn't particularly concerned about Neeve's arrival; what was one more man in a house filled to brim with them?

Neeve finally appeared on a spring evening when the already long shadows of the mountains to the west seemed even longer than usual. When Blue opened the door for him, he thought, for a moment, that Neeve was an unfamiliar old man, but then his eyes grew used to the stretched crimson light coming through the trees, and he saw that Neeve was barely older than his father, which was not very old at all.

Outside, in the distance, hounds were crying. Blue was familiar enough with their voices; each fall, the Aglionby Hunt Club rode out with horses and foxhounds nearly every weekend. Blue knew what their frantic howls meant at that moment: They were on the chase.

"You're Maurice's son," Neeve said, and before Blue could answer, he added, "this is the year you'll fall in love."


	2. Chapter 1

It was freezing in the churchyard, even before the dead arrived. Every year, Blue and his father, Maurice, had come to the same place, and every year it was chilly. But this year, without Maurice here with him, it felt colder. It was April 24, St. Mark's Eve. For most people, St. Mark's Day came and went without note. It wasn't a school holiday. No presents were exchanged. There were no costumes or festivals. There were no St. Mark's Day sales, no St. Mark's Day cards in the store racks, no special television programs that aired only once a year. No one marked April 25 on their calendar. In fact, most of the living were unaware that St. Mark even had a day named in his honor. But the dead remembered.

As Blue sat shivering on the stone wall, he reasoned that at least, at the very least, it wasn't raining this year. Every St. Mark's Eve, this was where Maurice and Blue drove to: an isolated church so old that its name had been forgotten. The ruin was cupped in the densely wooded hills outside of Henrietta, still several miles from the mountains proper. Only the exterior walls remained; the roof and floors had long ago collapsed inside. What hadn't rotted away was hidden under hungry vines and rancid-smelling saplings. The church was surrounded by a stone wall, broken only by a lych-gate just large enough for a coffin and its bearers. A stubborn path that seemed impervious to weeds led through to the old church door.

"Ah," hissed Neeve, plump but strangely elegant as he sat beside Blue on the wall. Blue was struck again, as he had been struck the first time he'd met Neeve, by his oddly lovely hands. Chubby wrists led to soft, child-like palms and slender fingers with oval nails. "Ah," Neeve murmured again. "Tonight is a night."

He said it like this: "Tonight is a _night_," and when he did, Blue felt his skin creep a little. Blue had sat watch with his father for the past ten St. Mark's Eves, but tonight felt different.

Tonight was a _night._

This year, for the first time, and for reasons Blue didn't understand, Maurice sent Neeve to do the church watch in his place. His father had asked Blue if he would go along as usual, but it wasn't really a question. Blue had always gone; he would go this time. It was not as if he had made plans for St. Mark's Eve. But he had to be asked. Maurice had decided sometime before Blue's birth that it was barbaric to order children about, and so Blue had grown up surrounded by imperative question marks.

Blue opened and closed his chilly fists. The top edges of his fingerless gloves were fraying; he'd done a bad job knitting them last year, but they had a certain trashy chic to them. If he hadn't been so vain, Blue could've worn the boring but functional gloves he'd been given for Christmas. But he _was _vain, so instead he had his fraying fingerless gloves, infinitely cooler though also colder, and no one to see them but Neeve and the dead.

April days in Henrietta were quite often fair, tender things, coaxing sleeping trees to bud and love-mad ladybugs to beat against window panes. But not tonight. It felt like winter.

Blue glanced at his watch. A few minutes until eleven. The old legends recommended the church watch be kept at midnight, but the dead kept poor time, especially when there wasn't a moon.

Unlike Blue, who didn't tend toward patience, Neeve was a regal statue on the old church wall: hands folded, ankles crossed. Blue, huddled, shorter and thinner, was a restless, sightless gargoyle. It wasn't a night for his ordinary eyes. It was a night for seers and psychics, witches and mediums. In other words, the rest of his family.

Out of the silence, Neeve asked, "Do you hear anything?" His eyes glittered in the black. "No," Blue answered, because he didn't. Then he wondered if Neeve had asked because Neeve did. Neeve was looking at him with the same gaze that he wore in all of his photos on the website — the deliberately unnerving, otherworldly stare that lasted several more seconds than was comfortable.

A few days after Neeve had arrived, Blue had been distressed enough to mention it to Maurice. They had both been crammed into the single bathroom, Blue getting ready for school, Maurice for work. Blue, trying to comb back the various bits of his dark hair, had asked, "Does he have to stare like that?" In the shower, his father drew patterns in the steamed glass door. He had paused to laugh, a flash of his skin visible through the long intersecting lines he had drawn. "Oh, that's just Neeve's trademark." Blue thought there were probably better things to be known for.

In the churchyard, Neeve said enigmatically, "There is a lot to hear." The thing was, there wasn't. In the summer, the foothills were alive with insects buzzing, mockingbirds whistling back and forth, ravens yelling at cars. But it was too cool, tonight, for anything to be awake yet. "I don't hear things like that," Blue said, a little surprised Neeve wasn't already aware. In Blue's intensely clairvoyant family, he was a fluke, an outsider to the vibrant conversation his father and uncles and cousins held with a world hidden to most people. The only thing that was special about her was something that she herself couldn't experience.

"I hear as much of the conversation as the telephone. I just make things louder for everyone else." Neeve still hadn't looked away. "So that's why Maurice was so eager for you to come along. Does he have you at all his readings as well?" Blue shuddered at the thought. A fair number of the clients who entered 300 Fox Way were miserable men hoping Maurice would see love and money in their future. The idea of being trapped in the house with that all day was excruciating. Blue knew it had to be very tempting for his father to have Blue present, making his psychic powers stronger. When he was younger, he'd never appreciated how little Maurice called on him to join in a reading, but now that Blue understood how well he honed other people's talents, he was impressed at Maurice's restraint. "Not unless it's a very important one," he replied.

Neeve's gaze had edged over the subtle line between discomfiting and creepy. He said, "It's something to be proud of, you know. To make someone else's psychic gift stronger is a rare and valuable thing." "Oh, pshaw," Blue said, but not cruelly. He meant to be funny. He'd had sixteen years to get used to the idea that he wasn't privy to the supernatural. He didn't want Neeve to think he was experiencing an identity crisis over it. He tugged a string on his glove.

"And you have plenty of time to grow into your own intuitive talents," Neeve added. His gaze seemed hungry. Blue didn't reply. He wasn't interested in telling other people's futures. He was interested in going out and finding his own.

Neeve finally dropped his eyes. Tracing an idle finger through the dirt on the stones between them, he said, "I passed by a school on the way into town. Aglionby Academy. Is that where you go?" Blue's eyes widened with humor. But of course Neeve, an outsider, couldn't know. Still, surely he could have guessed from the massive stone great hall and the parking lot full of cars that spoke German that it wasn't the sort of school that they could afford.

"It's an all-girls school. For politicians' daughters and oil barons' daughters and for" — Blue struggled the think of who else might be rich enough to send their kids to Aglionby — "the daughters of mistresses living off hush money." Neeve raised an eyebrow without looking up. "No, really, they're awful," Blue said.

April was a bad time for the Aglionby girls; as it warmed up, the convertibles appeared, bearing girls in shorts so tacky that only the rich would dare to wear them. During the school week, they all wore the Aglionby uniform: a skirt and a V-neck sweater with a raven emblem. It was an easy way to identify the advancing army. Raven girls. Blue continued, "They think they're better than us and that we're all falling all over ourselves for them and they drink themselves senseless every weekend and spray paint the Henrietta exit sign." Aglionby Academy was the number one reason Blue had developed her two rules: One, stay away from girls, because they were trouble. And two, stay away from Aglionby girls, because they were bastards.

"You seem like a very sensible teen," Neeve said, which annoyed Blue, because he already knew he was a very sensible teen. When you had as little money as the Sargents did, sensibility in all matters was ingrained young. In the ambient light from the nearly full moon, Blue caught sight of what Neeve had drawn in the dirt. He asked, "What is that? Dad drew that." "Did he?" Neeve said. They studied the pattern. It was three curving, intersecting lines, making a long sort of triangle. "Did he say what it was?" "He was drawing it on the shower door. I didn't ask."

"I dreamt it," Neeve said, in a flat voice that sent an unpleasant shudder along the back of Blue's neck. "I wanted to see what it looked like drawn out." He rubbed his palm through the pattern, then abruptly held up a beautiful hand. He said, "I think they're coming."

This was why Blue and Neeve were here. Every year, Maurice sat on the wall, knees pulled up to his chin, staring at nothing, and recited names to Blue. To Blue, the churchyard remained empty, but to Maurice, it was full of the dead. Not the currently dead, but the spirits of those who would die in the next twelve months. For Blue, it had always been like hearing one half of a conversation. Sometimes his father would recognize the spirits, but often he would have to lean forward to ask them their names. Maurice had once explained that if Blue wasn't there, he couldn't convince them to answer him — the dead couldn't see Maurice without Blue's presence.

Blue never grew tired of feeling particularly needed, but sometimes he wished needed felt less like a synonym for useful. The church watch was critical for one of Maurice's most unusual services. So long as clients lived in the area, he guaranteed to let them know if they or a local loved one was bound to die in the next twelve months. Who wouldn't pay for that? Well, the true answer was: most of the world, as most people didn't believe in psychics.

"Can you see anything?" Blue asked. He gave his numb hands a bracing rub before snatching up a notebook and pen. Maurice had never mentioned other dead people being attracted by Blue. Perhaps he hadn't wanted to scare her. Or maybe Maurice just hadn't seen them — maybe he was as blind to these other spirits as Blue was. Blue became uncomfortably aware of the slightest breeze touching his face, lifting Neeve's curly hair. Invisible, orderly spirits of not yet truly dead people were one thing. Ghosts that weren't compelled to stay on the path were another.

"Are they —" Blue started. "Who are you? Roberta Neuhmann," Neeve interrupted. "What's your name? Roman Vert. What's your name? Fabian Powell." Scratching quickly to catch up, Blue printed the names phonetically as Neeve solicited them. Every so often, she lifted her eyes to the path, trying to glimpse — something.

But as always, there was only the overgrown crabgrass, the barely visible oak trees. The black mouth of the church, accepting invisible spirits. Nothing to hear, nothing to see. No evidence of the dead except for their names written in the notebook in his hand. Maybe Neeve was right. Maybe Blue was having a bit of an identity crisis. Some days it did seem a little unfair that all of the wonder and power that surrounded his family was passed to Blue in the form of paperwork. At least I can still be a part of it, Blue thought grimly, although he felt about as included as a seeing eye dog.

He held the notebook up to his face, close, close, close, so he could read it in the darkness. It was like a roster of names popular seventy and eighty years before: Daniel, Ruby, Clara, Ethan, Hope, Melanie..

A lot of the same last names, too. The valley was dominated by several old families that were large if not powerful. Somewhere outside of Blue's thoughts, Neeve's tone became more emphatic. "What's your name?" he asked. "Excuse me. What is your name?" His consternated expression looked wrong on his face. Out of habit, Blue followed Neeve's gaze to the center of the courtyard. And he saw someone. Blue's heart hammered like a fist to his breastbone.

On the other side of the heartbeat, she was still there. Where there should have been nothing, there was a person. "I see her," Blue said. "Neeve, I see her." Blue had always imagined the procession of spirits to be an orderly thing, but this spirit wandered, hesitant. It was a young woman in slacks and a sweater, hair rumpled. She was not quite transparent, but she wasn't quite there, either. Her figure was as murky as dirty water, her face indistinct. There was no identifying feature to her apart from her youth. She was so young — that was the hardest part to get used to.

As Blue watched, she paused and put her fingers to the side of her nose and her temple. It was such a strangely living gesture that Blue felt a little sick. Then she stumbled forward, as if jostled from behind. "Get her name," Neeve hissed. "She won't answer me and I need to get the others!" "Me?" Blue replied, but he slid off the wall. His heart was still ramming inside his rib cage. He asked, feeling a little foolish, "What's your name?"

She didn't seem to hear him. Without a twitch of acknowledgment, she began to move again, slow and bewildered, toward the church door. Is this how we make our way to death? Blue wondered. A stumbling fade-out instead of a self-aware finale? As Neeve began again to call out questions to the others, Blue made his way toward the wanderer. "Who are you?" he called from a safe distance, as she dropped her forehead into her hands. Her form had no outline at all, he saw now, and her face was truly featureless. There was nothing about her, really, that made her human-shaped, but still, he saw a girl

. There was something telling her mind what she was, even if it wasn't telling his eyes. There was no thrill in seeing her, as he had thought there would be. All he could think was, She will be dead within a year. How did Maurice bear it? Blue stole closer. He was close enough to touch her as she began to walk again, but still she made no sign of seeing him. This near to her, his hands were freezing. His heart was freezing.

Invisible spirits with no warmth of their own sucked at his energy, pulling goose bumps up his arms. The young woman stood on the threshold of the church and Blue knew, just knew, that if she stepped into the church, he would lose the chance to get her name. "Please," Blue said, softer than before. He reached out a hand and touched the very edge of her not-there sweater. Cold flooded through him like dread.

He tried to steady herself with what she'd always been told: Spirits drew all their energy from their surroundings. All he was feeling was her using him to stay visible. But it still felt a lot like dread. he asked, "Will you tell me your name?" She faced him and he realized with shock that she wore an Aglionby sweater. "Gansey," she said. Though her voice was quiet, it wasn't a whisper. It was a real voice spoken from someplace almost too far away to hear.

Blue couldn't stop staring at her mussed hair, the suggestion of staring eyes, the raven on her sweater. Her shoulders were soaked, he saw, and the rest of her clothing rain-spattered, from a storm that hadn't happened yet. This close, he could smell something minty that he wasn't sure was unique to her or unique to spirits. She was so real. When it finally happened, when he finally saw her, it didn't feel like magic at all. It felt like looking into the grave and seeing it look back at her. "Is that all?" he whispered. Gansey closed her eyes. "That's all there is." She fell to his knees — a soundless gesture for a girl with no real body. One hand splayed in the dirt, fingers pressed to the ground. Blue saw the blackness of the church more clearly than the curved shape of her shoulder. "Neeve," Blue said. "Neeve, she's — dying."

Neeve had come to stand just behind him. He replied, "Not yet." Gansey was nearly gone now, fading into the church, or the church fading into her. Blue's voice was breathier than he would have liked. "Why — why can I see her?" Neeve glanced over his shoulder, either because there were more spirits coming or because there weren't — Blue couldn't tell. By the time he looked back, Gansey had vanished entirely. Already Blue felt warmth returning to his skin, but something behind his lungs felt icy. A dangerous, sucking sadness seemed to be opening up inside him: grief or regret.

"There are only two reasons a non-seer would see a spirit on St. Mark's Eve, Blue. Either you're her true love," Neeve said, "or you killed her."


End file.
